Thinking about teaching, I am one of the lucky people in this world who was rendered only a marginal disgrace to the human race by a number of good teachers (and to be truthful not helped much by some duds). Many people have one such. This is a summer thread, just because. I bet people have best music teachers, or just teachers. A bit of homage, then.
The best teacher I ever had was a funny old coot who tried to teach me mathematics at a private boy's school in Canada. His name was Larry Griffith, and he was in many ways a genius -- he had been involved in the Manhattten Project, and upon his retirement after many years as a physicist/engineer had taken up teaching. He was short and tubby, with a pipe that usually began to set his filthy tweed jacket on fire. He constantly grumbled at our stupidity. He had written the main innovative mathematics textbook for the province, and so we got massive doses of calculus, vectors, and matrices, all of which was generally believed to be way over our heads, but turned out not to be, thanks to his passion. Well, for almost everyone.
Being completely incompetent at mathematics then and now, I was a terrible trial to him. He desperately wanted to me to learn calculus, and he would yell at me every day that I would never amount to anything unless I slept with logarithm tables under my pillow. After endless effort, and his endless variations on new methods of explaining things to me, I finally learned calculus and passed the final exam. I have never looked at a math book since, but I revere all mathematicians and believe stupidly that I could, maybe, with work get what they are doing. A friend and I once collected a pamphlet of his sayings -- "What one fool can do, another can", was his main maxim for us. At one time he had been in a dance band in the 1930's, and in the evenings, while tutoring students, he would occasionally bring out his ukelele and play. He is long dead, but loved by all of those, like me, who knew that he was completely committed to us, and to the infinitesimal possibility that one day we might get a glimpse of his wonderful mathematics. He was about as close to a gruff saint as I have found in this world.
yours, Peter T.